The sentence, “the journey to Jesus is longer and filled with more barriers than ever” made me think of a few things. As I am a product of American culture myself, and my exposure to Christianity was the Catholic Church for the first eight years of my primary education; hence I am of the “Catholic and secular lens”, yet things did not turn out altogether poorly for me in the sense of spiritual affairs.

Paul Goodman, a mostly forgotten poet, writing in the 1960s, (after being heckled while delivering a campus speech) said: “I realized that they did not believe there was a nature of things; to them, there was no knowledge but only the sociology of knowledge. They had learned so well that physical and sociological research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they were doubtful that there was such a thing as simple truth…”

Cheers.

It is the formation of this background imagination that intrigues me about Tom’s analysis of the beginning years of YFC. It seems that his concern goes something like this: YFC’s early approach to youth ministry did indeed bring kids in so that they hear the gospel (the point you make under #2), but did it form their Christian imagination in such a way that they have to unlearn or outgrow certain things in order to reach maturity? The worry seems to be that these youth weren’t aware that they have to “grow up” spirituality; the vision they were given of the Christian life simply doesn’t include a vision of growth toward maturity. So, the question for YFC or Young Life or the youth ministry at the local church around the corner (the question I believe Tom is trying to get everyone to ask) is whether the vision of the Christian life includes movement toward spiritual maturity. This would go beyond methods and practices, although those methods and practices are always driven by an underlying theology.

What are your thoughts about this? Does this ring true?

Having taught at HU for some time now and seen countless young evangelicals come through your classes, what do you see? Is it the worship norms of low-church evangelicals? Is it their doctrine of Scripture and attending practices of reading and preaching? Is it the way evangelism is carried out, which springs from an unstated theology of salvation and conversion? Is it their doctrine of the church and the related understandings of the individual related to the community?

In the 1940s and 1950s, the leaders of YFC and Young Life argued that in light of their urgent call to youth evangelism, they should be free to make Christianity more youth friendly. They further argued that even somewhat questionable cultural adaptations were OK because their organizations were not churches. They fully expected churches to operate differently and to invest in youth discipleship in ways that their organizations could not. But what happened instead was that church leaders said “Hey, they are gathering big crowds of youth, let’s do what they are doing.” Even all of this might not have been as damaging if it weren’t for the fact that adulthood itself changed and came to look a lot more like adolescence. So now, young people enter into an adolescent spirituality that is hard to grow out of as they age. As a result, churches just keep giving people more of what they should only need at an earlier, evangelistic stage of their spiritual development.

So on one level, the issue is the gap between evangelism and discipleship, a gap that is at times reinforced by the structural disconnect between youth ministries and the rest of the church. But at a deeper level, there may be problems with how we are communicating the gospel itself. I share with Dallas Willard a concern that the gospel we sometimes preach in American churches does not contain any expectation of transformation. According to Willard, a gospel that says “You will be in heaven when you die if you believe that Jesus took your beating” is unlikely to produce spiritual growth because the person who accepts that gospel has not signed up for any spiritual growth. Youth ministries did not create that narrow view of the gospel, but neither did they do much to effectively oppose it and provide a deeper alternative.